Iran’s president wants debate with Bush at U.N.

Veiled threat to Bush?
During an earlier speech Wednesday to a religious conference, the president said he proposed a debate originally “to say that the period of bullying has expired. But false advocators of democracy avoided it because of their arrogance and lack of logic,” Ahmadinejad said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

He also issued a veiled threat to Bush at the religious conference, the news agency said, saying that anyone who turned down an invitation was likely to face a bad fate — although the agency did not release his exact quotes.

The nuclear talks had been tentatively set for Wednesday in Vienna as a final attempt to see if there was common ground to start negotiations between Iran and the six nations trying to persuade it to limit its nuclear program.

The European Union’s Javier Solana had been ready to fly to the Austrian capital at short notice, but the talks had been left hanging by uncertainty over whether Iranian nuclear envoy Ali Larijani would come.

“We will not have the meeting today in Vienna,” Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Associated Press, after Iran postponed the meeting. “Both sides are arranging (a meeting) for a couple of days later.”

There was no immediate comment from Solana’s office in Brussels. Soltanieh said the decision to postpone any meeting had been mutual, but it appeared that Iranian reluctance had scuttled the chance of talks Wednesday.

Annan, whose trip to Tehran last week failed to budge the leadership on its refusal to give up enrichment, urged Iran during a visit to Ankara, Turkey, “to do whatever it can to reassure the international community that indeed its intentions are peaceful.”

Russia and China, which are both veto-wielding members of the Security Council and have key trade ties with Tehran, have urged patience with Iran.

Some European nations also remain hesitant to call a halt to three years of talks, with Britain the firmest backer of the U.S. drive for punitive measures.

On Wednesday, Moscow appeared to hold out a possible compromise, saying any U.N. sanctions — if imposed on Iran — would necessarily rule out military action against the country. Iran has long craved just such a security guarantee from the United States, but it was unclear if Washington would agree to any such explicit guarantee, or insist on keeping its options open.

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